


Try to Make Me Clean

by ab2fsycho



Series: Reddie Set Go, Beep Beep [3]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, the underwater kiss we deserved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-11-28 17:24:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20970263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ab2fsycho/pseuds/ab2fsycho
Summary: The swim in the quarry was postponed due to Richie's injury, but he gets to enjoy the company with Eddie at his side.





	Try to Make Me Clean

Richie’s feet dangled off the rock, pant legs rolled up to his knees as the water lapped up to his calves. “This isn’t fair,” he grumped, watching everyone swim and play while he was stranded ashore. The crutch lay limp at his side, evidence of his injury within eyesight at all times.

“Why do you wanna swim in shitty water anyway? Let them get E. Coli,” Eddie argued behind him.

“Eddie, we swam here at least twice a week as kids and never got sick, it’s fine,” Bill declared.

“Alternatively,” Eddie’s hand came up, ready to chop the air with his wisdom, “it’s what’s fucking wrong with us today.”

“There it is, the secret to our power,” Mike said with a laugh.

“Shitty ass water!” Ben chimed in.

“Doesn’t make me feel any less bummed.” Richie shifts, cringing as the wound in his back lanced up his side. Eddie’s hand found his shoulder, squeezing lightly and taking his mind off the pain. Richie found himself smiling under Eddie’s palm. “Then again, it’s not so bad.”

They watched the others together, splashing and laughing just like they’d done when they were kids. Richie’s arm snaked around Eddie’s waist, the smaller sitting next to him. He remembered a moment similar to this one, lingering in the back of his mind where the dead tended to reside. Richie’s fist balled in Eddie’s shirt, grasping for the present as the lost past and the predicted future locked hands and spun before his closed eyes. Another moment played across the back of his eyelids, a moment where he sat in the water with the others uninjured and alone. Tears fell from his eyes, heartbreak splitting his chest open and baring his soul to the other Losers. He took off his glasses to wipe his eyes, then tried to clean the blood off of them.

“Richie?” Eddie’s voice snapped him back, and he dropped his glasses. He hadn’t realized he’d been acting out the him in his vision, the version of himself revealed to him in the deadlights. That version of him hadn’t had the love of his life sitting beside him. That version of him would never see Eddie again. “Rich, you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” he assured, sniffing hard and grunting lightly. “Maybe you’re right about this gray water shit, Eds.”

Eddie paused, the nickname flying completely over his head. “You’re admitting I’m right?”

“Yeah, it must be,” he cleared his throat, wiping his face free of the saltwater, “fucking with my sinuses or something.”

He saw Eddie’s blurred out hand gesture to him out of the corner of his eye. “Case in point. All of you. Even Trashmouth agrees with me.”

“You know exactly why he’d agree with you on anything, Eddie,” Mike replied, grin so big Richie could see it. “We were all there for drugged up Trashmouth.”

“Mike!” Eddie yelled, his voice echoing through the quarry.

“Oh how the turntables,” Richie said through his now thoroughly clogged nose. “Someone else needs to get beep beeped and I can’t even see who it is.”

Bill turned around in the water, as if only just realizing Richie was missing one of his defining features. “What happened to your glasses?”

“I dropped ‘em, anyone feel like fishing them out?”

The other four Losers preoccupied themselves with the search, but Eddie soon had Richie’s undivided attention. Fingers brushed his jaw and guided Richie to look at Eddie’s furrowed brow. It should have been funny, how Eddie could contort his face to a point Richie could see the lines without his glasses. “I’m serious, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Richie said a little too quickly. Their foreheads pressed together, noses brushing and eyes closed. For a moment, everything else disappeared and it was just the two of them sitting hip to hip with their heads pressed together for comfort. He didn’t want to tell Eddie what he’d seen, the horror so unspeakable he feared giving them voice would make them come true. 

At the same time, he suspected Eddie already knew what might have become of him judging by the way Richie had clung to him ever since he’d awoken from the hospital. “You know you can talk to me, Rich,” Eddie assured.

“I know. Just, not about this.” He never wanted the vision he’d seen to come to pass. Now that Pennywise the shithead clown was dead, it didn’t have to. Still, that fear that his Eds would be yanked away at any moment lingered. Before he started crying again, he deflected. “Alright, get in there and find my prescription glasses, Dr. K.”

“Like hell, dickhead.”

“I need ‘em to see your cute face.”

“Don’t you keep a spare pair?”

“That WAS my spare pair.” Richie lifted his arm, ignoring the pain in his back long enough to singlehandedly shove Eddie forward. 

Richie’s, “Chop cho- OP!” came spewing from his lips the same time as Eddie’s, “Assh- OLE!” In a perfect flight of limbs, Eddie gripped Richie’s jacket collar as gravity stole him off the rock. The pair careened into the water, Richie’s back burning, then screaming from the cold water hitting his whole body. He and Eddie were a tangle of arms and legs in the water, Richie immediately fumbling for the other’s shoulders and sides as his injury lanced his back. Once he found purchase in the other man’s clothes, Eddie found his feet. The two worked together to push each other up and break the surface.

They came up gasping for air, then started shouting. “Richie, your back!”

“Why’d you grab me, dumbass?”

“Because you pushed me! Now your stitches will get infected!”

“Well, you shouldn’t have grabbed me, look!” Richie ignored the spike of pain in his hip as he hopped off one foot and put all his weight on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie teetered, shouting as Richie declared, “Not so easy keeping balance, is it?”

“Beep beep, Richie, beep bee-!” Eddie sank, and Richie went down with him. They flailed underwater, Richie most assuredly bleeding through his destroyed bandage and shirt now. Through the green of the water, he was able to make out the off pallor of Eddie’s face. Sliding his palms from his shoulders to his neck, Richie pressed his lips to Eddie’s underwater. The kicking and swinging ceased, the two floating in a soundless vacuum for however long the kiss lasted. Richie’s mouth moved against Eddie’s, the smaller man completely still until his hand moved to Richie’s sides. Eyes closed, dark hair haloing their heads, clothes drifting up on their bodies as they hovered, Richie and Eddie lost one another in the space-like pause that was the quarry.

They only resurfaced when the pounding in their ears and the aching in their chests became too much to bear. Richie’s hands continued to frame Eddie’s face, Eddie huffing red as he likely glowered back at Richie. Richie knew that face, that mix of fury and laughter and something else he had never been able to name before now. He knew it, and he loved it so much. “I love how angry I can make you.”

“Yeah, only you can do this shit to me I hope you know.” Richie beamed, snorting loudly. Only Eddie could make him feel normal at his most obnoxious. “We really need to disinfect and redress your—”

“Zip your vagina.” Richie yanked Eddie against him, ignoring the sting and burn in favor of pressing more fervent kisses to his best friend’s lips. Richie’s large hands framed Eddie’s face, smoothing out wet hair with his fingertips. Eddie’s own fingers twined through Richie’s curls, holding him in place as they maintained their place above the water’s surface.

Something hard, like the shell of an animal, brushed Richie’s leg, but he didn’t care. He didn’t even hear Big Bill when he asked the others, “Think he’ll notice if we toss his glasses at his head?”

“Absolutely not,” Ben muttered, arm flung over Beverly’s shoulders.


End file.
